


many happy returns

by nebulousviolet



Category: Ouran High School Host Club - All Media Types
Genre: Contemplative, F/M, Unwanted Proposal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-30
Updated: 2018-10-30
Packaged: 2019-08-11 00:31:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16465250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nebulousviolet/pseuds/nebulousviolet
Summary: Kaoru had long since grown tired of playing Kings and Queens like a child.





	many happy returns

**Author's Note:**

> the beach scene mentioned in this fic is a reference to something i posted on ff.net a few months ago that will hopefully be crossposted here soon.

“Did you hear the news?” Kyoya asks dryly. “Tamaki proposed.”

At some point, Kaoru Hitachiin and Kyoya Ootori had become unlikely friends. It had started, perhaps, the night Tamaki and Haruhi became official; the night Kyoya and Kaoru had sat on a sandy private beach and lamented their woes. They drink together every Saturday, now, Kyoya setting his glasses down as he prepares to bitch about everyone they know. Of course, the Shadow King himself never gets drunk, but Kaoru often does, and he enjoys these evenings, drinking and laughing and pretending that, just for a moment, he is sixteen again and anything is possible.

“How could I have not heard the news?” Kaoru snorts. His fingers twitch where they rest on his empty glass - for once, he is sober for their little talks. “Hikaru threw a fit, and Tamaki won’t shut up about it. So you must know I heard the news, and now you want to discuss it.”

Kyoya’s mouth curves into something that isn’t quite a smile, but is close.”He asked me to be best man,” he says neutrally, and Kaoru closes his eyes.

“I’m sure he did.”

“Do you think she’ll have bridesmaids?” Kyoya asks, and Kaoru’s eyes flutter open again. “Suppose she brings her Boston friends?”

“I hope not,” Kaoru mutters. He’d met Haruhi’s Boston friends last year; a group of loudmouthed white girls who didn’t believe in privacy. Maybe his memory fails him, though - if he’s brutally honest, it wasn’t exactly Haruhi’s friends that made him hate that Boston trip. It had been Tamaki, looming and leering like the King he was supposed to be, except Kaoru had long since grown tired of playing Kings and Queens like a child. And Haruhi had looked at him with those sad eyes of hers as he boarded his plane and said,  _ will you write? _

So no, Kaoru doesn’t much like Haruhi’s Boston friends, or Boston at all.

“It’s odd,” Kyoya continues, twisting the knife in just that little bit deeper. Kaoru wishes he’d had something to drink after all. “All this talk of her wedding, and yet Haruhi herself has said nothing at all.”

She had said something, he thinks. Kaoru had picked her up from the airport - Tamaki was staying behind for another week to pack things up - and she’d gotten off the plane and slipped her engagement ring off. “You’re not normally supposed to take those things off, you know,” he’d told her, and Haruhi had raised her eyebrows at him in challenge.

“It’s too heavy to wear all the time,” she’d said, her voice laden with hidden meaning, her eyes beseeching, and Kaoru had had to look away then, because he hadn’t wanted to see his best friend slash first love cry in his backseat over what was meant to be one of the happiest days of her life.

“But she loves him,” Kaoru whispers, more to himself than anything. Kyoya sighs.

“Indeed she does,” he says. Kyoya Ootori, a third son who can always see more than he’s supposed to. Kaoru feels naked under his watchful eyes. “No accounting for taste, I suppose.”

Kaoru is, of course, expected to be happy for her. Hikaru is supposed to be jealous, not Kaoru,  _ never _ Kaoru. He thinks of Haruhi’s sad eyes. And Kaoru knows she loves Tamaki, she really does; she tells him that everytime she leans a little close, or hugs a little too tightly, as if she’s trying to convince the both of them. But he’d always hoped - he doesn’t know what he’d hoped, but he’d hoped for more than this, more than this Cinderella story of black and white. The story where Kaoru doesn’t get the girl, and Tamaki does. The story where Kaoru is supposed to let go.

Yet ask anyone, and they’ll tell you this: no Hitachiin has ever mastered the art of letting go.

Hikaru has always been a red-hot fire, burning bright with anger. But Kaoru and Kyoya, they are a chemical burn, subtle, devastating. Tamaki, of course, is their star. In more ways than one, and it’s unfair, it’s so  _ unfair,  _ all of this is. 

“I think-“ Kaoru begins, and his words stick in his throat like the honey cakes that Haruhi bakes on Wednesdays, like too-sweet iced tea he once gulped down on a morning in Karuizawa so long ago. “I think they’ll be very happy together.”

“And you?” Kyoya presses. “Will you be happy?”

“I’m the comic relief, remember?” Kaoru deflects easily. Kyoya doesn’t say anything to that. “Being happy is sort of what I’m supposed to be, isn’t it?”

“So you won’t be,” Kyoya decides. “For someone who’s supposed to be so selfish, you’re taking this remarkably well.”

Kaoru smiles bitterly and twists his hands together. “We  _ expect _ the love we think we deserve, Kyoya-senpai,” he says. “But it doesn’t always mean that we get what we want. Some things just aren’t meant to be.”

“You’re sure about that?” Kyoya wonders. Kyoya, master of so many schemes; Kyoya, a finger in many pies; Kyoya, covering them all and yet keeping a gun to their heads all the same. Kaoru thinks of Haruhi taking her engagement ring off, already unhappily married and not even yet wed. This is how it pans out, he thinks. They will marry and have 2.5 kids and I will watch them and I will wonder what our own children would’ve looked like. 

And it won’t matter, because she loves Tamaki, because Tamaki loves her, because Kaoru has never stood a chance. He wishes childhood didn’t have to end. He wishes that they could’ve stayed at Ouran forever, where nothing was real and consequences were minimal and all seven of them could jostle and joke and nobody cared about weddings or children or duties. 

Because Kaoru loves Haruhi, and Haruhi loves Kaoru, but all stories have to come to an end, and Kaoru isn’t meant to be part of this one. Kaoru is only ever part of a pair. He will always be a Hitachiin.

“I’m sure,” he whispers, and fuck it, he didn’t sign up for this. He reaches for the bottle of gin he keeps tucked away for when Haruhi’s sad eyes haunt him full force, and pours himself a full glass. “Or at least, she must be.”

**Author's Note:**

> please comment and leave kudos!


End file.
